On average, an employee’s name appears 16 different times across myriad corporate systems. It’s more than likely Joe Doak’s payroll records, human resource dossier and travel preferences are all completely separate. Each instance of Doak’s name is unaware of the others. If Doak’s name appears 16 times inside the company, imagine the havoc wrought by a simple change of address.

We all know what happens. The address gets changed in one or two places, with the other records trailing by years or, worse, never catching up. And the likelihood of all records ever containing the same basic information is slim to none. What’s the answer? The Holy Grail, of course–global directories.

No one disputes the huge advantage of global directories, doing no less than what IBM’s …

A tiny computer lock developed by the organization that guards America’s nuclear stockpile is promising big network security benefits.

But industry observers are only cautiously optimistic that the device will do what its developers claim.

Measuring 4.6 mm by 9.24 mm, the latest weapon in the battle for enterprise security is no bigger than a shirt button. The lock consists of six code wheels, each of which can be turned to one of 10 positions, limiting would-be crackers to a one-in-a-million chance of breaking the code.

“What’s kind of cool is that nothing limits us to one in a million,” says Frank Peter, a mechanical engineer at Albuquerque, N.M.-based Sandia National Laboratories and designer of the chip lock. “We’re starting to think about one-in-a-trillion (odds) or

There’s a mystique to the term business plan that makes it sound like you couldn’t possibly do one without an MBA or two, but much of what makes up a bona-fide blueprint is probably already in your head. A business plan is a part-words and part-numbers profile of where you are, where you want to go, and how you plan to get there.

The words describe your company, its products and services, competitors, customers, management, operations, marketing and sales plans, industrial outlook, and long-term goals. The numbers estimate your cash flow, income and expenses, balance sheet (what you have and what you owe), and a break-even analysis. There aren’t too many people not intimidated by both numbers and words, but once you break the plan down …

Back in 1997, IT managers at Miami University set out to make their system Y2K compliant–and their technology overhaul snowballed shortly thereafter.

“We realized that the amount we were willing to invest for Y2K could bring us a whole new system that would grow with our future technology needs,” says Kristin Froehlke, associate provost for computing and information services and CIO at Miami University. “We knew it was time to seize the moment.”

Their first need was for a more robust software solution to handle the school’s many administrative duties. They had been operating with a patchwork of commercial, custom and homegrown legacy systems and applications running on an IBM 9672 R21 mainframe under OS/390 MVS and CICS.

F YOU THINK YOUR PRIVACY IS PROTECTED, GUESS again. Anyone with access to a computer and certain online services can dig up more about you in one afternoon than an old gumshoe could track down in a week. In just 10 minutes, for example, we found out Vice President Al Gore’s and House Speaker Newt at Gingrich’s home addresses and phone numbers, their lengths of residency, the value of their homes, and their estimated incomes, using the PeopleTracker database. PeopleTracker also provides another choice bit of information: The names, addresses, and phone numbers of Gore’s and Gingrich’s neighbors.

Fame and fortune, however, are not criteria for disclosure. Depending on the state you live in, other CDB Infotek services and databases, such as Nexis, might provide personal …